Discover Service Provider. The customer identifies which SP can deliver the necessary resources that meet their needs. Thus, the customer must have a precise definition and scope of the desired service and conduct an investigation to list current service necessities.
Discover Service Provider. In current utility computing environments, especially Grid and Cloud, it is important to locate resources that can satisfy consumers‟ requirement efficiently and optimally (Gong et. al. 2003). Such computing environ- ments contain a large collection of different types of resources, which are distributed worldwide. These re- sources are owned and operated by various providers with heterogeneous administrative policies. Resources or services can join and leave a computing environment at anytime. Therefore, their status changes dynamically and unpredictably. Solutions for service provider discovery problems must efficiently deal with scalability, dynamic changes, heterogeneity and autonomous administration.
Discover Service Provider. In the Grid computing community, Xxxxxxxxxx (1997) introduced the Monitoring and Discovery System, Xxxx et al. (2003) proposed the XXXX Grid Project and also relevant is the work of Xxxxxxxxx et al. (2001). Monitoring and Discovery System (MDS) is the information service described in the Globus project (Xxxxxxxxxx 1997). In its architecture, Lightweight Directory Access Protocol (LDAP) is used as directory service, and information stored in information servers are organised in tree topology. In utility computing systems, resources‟ availability and capability are dynamic in nature. However, in MDS, the relationship between information and information servers is static. In addition, service provider‟s information is fre- quently updated in these dynamic changing environments, whilst LDAP is not designed for writing and updating information. XXXX Infrastructure for Resource Discovery (VIRD) has a three-level hierarchy architecture. The top level is a backbone, which is responsible for the inter-domain resource discovery and consists of Border Grid Resource Name Servers (BGRNS). The second level consists of several domains and each domain consists of Grid Resource Name Servers (GRNS). The third level includes all clients and resource provid- ers. There is no central control in this architecture, thus resource providers register themselves to GRNS server within a domain. When clients submit requests, GRNS responses to them with requested resources. The limitation of this architecture is that it only focuses on the issue of scalability and dynamic environ- mental changes but not on heterogeneity and autonomous administration. Xxxxxxxxx et al. (2001) propose a resource discovery framework using peer-to-peer (P2P) technologies in Grids. P2P architecture is fully distributed and all the nodes are equivalent. However, one major limita- tion of their work is that every node has little knowledge about resources distribution and their status. Specifically, when there is large number of resource types or the work-set is very large, the opportunity for inaccurate results increases, because the framework is not able to use history data to accurately dis- cover resources.
